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Using His Fans to Introduce a Girlfriend

FRAGRANCE counters could soon be catching another case of Bieber Fever as they begin selling a second celebrity scent from the young singer Justin Bieber.

Fragrance No. 2, called Justin Bieber’s Girlfriend, is scheduled to arrive the week of June 18 at Macy’s stores, and will also be available this month at retailers like Belk, Dillard’s, Nordstrom and Sephora. Girlfriend will arrive a year after the introduction of the first scent endorsed by Mr. Bieber, Someday, which became the best-selling celebrity fragrance ever and the best-selling new women’s fragrance of any kind brought out in 2011.

As befits a performer whose following is concentrated so much among young people, the campaign to promote Girlfriend, with a budget estimated at $20 million, is focusing on social media like Tumblr and Twitter. Mr. Bieber’s Twitter feed is followed by almost 22.9 million people, and he has close to 44 million “likes” on Facebook.

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The new media aspects of the campaign will also touch on the ads appearing in traditional media. For instance, Mr. Bieber is going on Facebook and Viddy, a mobile video sharing service, this week to invite fans to enter a “sing-off” on Tumblr to help create a 60-second television commercial for Girlfriend.

The commercial will be composed of video clips of fans performing their versions of a new Bieber song, “Boyfriend,” with lyrics they rewrite to change the song to “Girlfriend.” The commercial is set to make its debut on June 21 during a special on NBC devoted to Mr. Bieber.

“With Girlfriend, we are channeling the spirit and passion of one of the largest, most dedicated digital fan bases on earth,” said Pelle Sjoenell, executive creative director of the Los Angeles office of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, which Give Back Brands — the company that markets the Bieber celebrity fragrances — hired to create the introductory campaign for Girlfriend.

“We saw firsthand the passion of Justin Bieber’s fans through our work on Google Chrome,” Mr. Sjoenell said. His reference was to a commercial, part of a series for the Google browser, that his agency created last year that traced the start of the singer’s career from the days when his mother uploaded his performance videos to YouTube.

The agency working on media planning for the Girlfriend campaign, Media Kitchen in New York, part of the Maxxcom Global Media division of MDC Partners, also handled those duties for the Someday campaign.

“Can you imagine what it would cost to reach more than 40 million people in mass media today?” asked Barry Lowenthal, president at Media Kitchen, making reference to Mr. Bieber’s legion of fans on social media.

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A campaign to promote Justin Bieber’s Girlfriend, a new women’s fragrance, will include print ads but will focus on social media like Tumblr and Twitter. His Twitter feed is followed by almost 22.9 million people.

“Ten million dollars,” he said, if that audience were reached through three commercials on the season finale of “American Idol.”

Traditional media has a place in the campaign, Mr. Lowenthal noted, citing the commercial and print ads, photographed by Ben Watts, that will run in magazines like Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Seventeen and Teen Vogue. They can be amplified by new media outlets that are fueled by the fervor of “all the fans who want to get closer to Justin,” he added.

For instance, the 10 to 12 winners of the “sing-off” whose videos are chosen for the commercial will have their Twitter handles appear on screen during the spot. And “there will be lots of other digital experiences for the rest of the year,” Mr. Lowenthal said.

Sometimes, however, there are drawbacks to the digital approach.

“We crash servers all the time,” said Brad Haugen, chief marketing officer at Scooter Braun Projects, the company led by Mr. Bieber’s manager, Scooter Braun. Mr. Haugen estimated that “over 4 percent of Twitter’s servers” are devoted to the traffic generated by Mr. Bieber and his followers.

The Bieber brand is powerful, as evidenced by the retail sales of Someday as well as Mr. Bieber’s ranking of No. 3 on the 2012 Celebrity 100 list compiled by Forbes magazine, behind Jennifer Lopez and Oprah Winfrey. Mr. Bieber even made the cover of Forbes, clad in an outfit — suit, white shirt, tie — befitting his annual earnings, estimated by Forbes at $55 million.

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Going beyond traditional media will enable the Girlfriend campaign “to break through and allow fans to engage,” said Noreen Dodge, executive vice president for global marketing at Give Back Brands.

She said there were few concerns that Girlfriend might cannibalize sales of Someday because “young girls wear multiple fragrances.”

As for the other sex, Ms. Dodge said, “we would absolutely in the future consider a male fragrance” from Mr. Bieber.

Celebrity scents are sometimes seen as the red-haired stepchildren of the fragrance industry. At the Fragrance Foundation Awards last month, at which Someday won Celebrity Fragrance of the Year, Women’s Wear Daily reported that the actress Jane Lynch joked, “Why is it that singers always come out with fragrances, but Marc Jacobs has yet to drop an album?”

Ms. Dodge was undaunted. “I think there’s a tremendous amount of respect for celebrity fragrances” among retailers, she said. She pointed to another article in Women’s Wear Daily, in which a Macy’s executive said that celebrity scents made up 10 percent of her fragrance business, compared with an estimate that such products made up 4 percent of all scent sales.

A version of this article appears in print on June 6, 2012, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Using His Fans To Introduce A Girlfriend. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe